I Don’t Want Kids Because I Made Enough Sacrifices Without My Consent

Not wanting to be a parent is valid enough, even in the best of circumstances. But have you thought about how many sacrifices you’ve made without asking, and now are expected to make even MORE?

Throughout my life, there always seemed to be this notion that I had to constantly sacrifice something.

For…what or whom, was never really clear.

Grades? Money? Appearance?

Now that I look at it in my late thirties, it seems incredibly stupid and most of all, pointless.

I did not ask to be born, but I was to someone who abused me.

Do you know how demoralizing it was to unwittingly and unwillingly give up huge swaths of your childhood to having to regulate the emotions of a grown adult, all while people around you gaslight you about how you’re some normal bratty kid who’s just sad they didn’t get that toy they wanted? And being told in that pedantic, “all adults automatically know better” voice, that sometimes you just have to make sacrifices?

Looking back, it’s also galling that as a kid I had to sacrifice what little time I had to myself to do homework. A task that only makes life harder for kids and parents alike, doesn’t actually help them learn, makes kids’ lives harder if they have abusive homes like I did, and just serves to teach kids that their time isn’t theirs when they get home, that the capitalist hellscape NEVER leaves you the fuck alone.

I don’t remember any of the homework I did. But the games I played in those days gave me dreams of becoming a game developer. I’ve written essays about those games that opened more opportunities in both the industry and media crit fields. Not only was this sacrifice imposed on me, it’s one that held me back.

Oh and for younger readers coming across this, I don’t even remember what my grades were high school, college, and grad school. They never mattered for any job I held or for the businesses I built. You’re being asked to make sacrifices in a complete hellworld for something that won’t even matter in a few years!

I loathed being treated like a dumb piece of property with no rights or autonomy until I turned 18, and even after 18 that feeling doesn’t necessarily dissipate given how much of our society is built around parents/guardians retaining financial control in your college years (which by the way, don’t have to happen at 18–24).

It seemed to me that I had to constantly put my life on hold for some academic or professional pursuit that was supposedly for my betterment and then it turned out to rarely be the case.

If not through K-12, then for college and being a recession dodger in grad school. Then things like constantly getting certificates employers wound up not caring about, like the $700 I lit on fire for QuickBooks training. Grad school at least treated me like an adult and gave me enough leeway to pursue my lifelong dream of getting into the video game business. What with the 2008 meltdown basically hadouken-ing thousands of entry and semi-entry level financial jobs that just never ever came back.

Nevertheless, I was beaten over the head with this “sacrifice now so you can have a better future” messaging. Which the Great Recession proved largely to be complete bullshit.

I had many radicalizing experiences doing tax returns and processing things like co-op board packages and divorce papers for Manhattan’s landed gentry and HENRYs. One of them was the sheer number of people who did nothing but go to their corporate jobs, spend, and go home. They rarely took vacations or did anything nice for themselves despite living in these eye-popping apartments that were nothing like the shitholes in The Bronx I’ve lived in my entire adult life.

But the financial crisis came and all their sacrifice was moot: many of my old firm’s clients were too old to just move up to another, better-paying job. Yet they were too young to retire.

Sacrifice your dreams and identity for supposed stability that turns out to not really be stable. What a scam.

I saw that as making a sacrifice under coercion. They were only doing what financial magazines and so-called conventional wisdom browbeat them into for decades. But that sacrifice was so heartbreakingly pointless when these same corporate overlords and the financial industry could just take it all away from you with a few clicks, or the stroke of a pen.

I did not ask to be born in the imperialist oligarchy of the United States where things like this routinely happen.

I had a misplaced patriotism in my early twenties which I guess still holds true; love the land and some of the people but loathe the system. As the late great Michael Brooks said, “Be kind to people, ruthless to systems.” But if you were born in America, you are born making tons of sacrifices you did not ask for. Even more if you are a marginalized gender, not white, and/or disabled.

This land is a duality of excess and sacrifice.

So, where do kids come into this?

In addition to the sacrifices we’re already told to make on personal and society-wide levels, plus the ones the capitalist machine demands of us once we’re adults, women and femmes are expected to constantly sacrifice and diminish themselves in service to others.

Or, horror of horrors, we’re SELFISH for demanding any time to rest or do things for ourselves instead of the capitalist machine or the male gaze.

First, the push to constantly sacrifice and change ourselves is for our so-called betterment. Then it’s because everyone else around us needs support: classmates, co-workers, romantic partners, nuclear and extended family, and community with no regard for how we’re burning out. No, you just get called STRONG and BRAVE with no fucking offers for help.

I see the sheer amount of sacrifice involved in being a parent and I just noped out.

No way. Not after all these sacrifices I made without my goddamn consent my entire life.

How many times did I have to put my life on hold because of systems I did not ask to participate in? The sheer trauma not just from being abused at home and school as a child, but the one shared by millions of elder Millennials: the one where so many of us spent years with little or no income.

I have scars that will never heal from this trauma, but I’ve made incredible progress. Now I must supercharge that healing by leaving home, taking my business and a select amount of possessions with me to my destiny in California.

There’s just no way I could do this if I had kids to care for, unless I was Kim Kardashian or something. Jessica Wildfire gave a succinct breakdown of how American motherhood is a scam. When my abusive mother died, the way people approached the subject stuck with me to this day: the concept of motherhood is worshiped, actual mothers are sent to a woodchipper.

I later had to put my life on hold because of other things I didn’t ask for, like multiple foot surgeries. Which would’ve sucked even in a socialist utopia, though various things would’ve been easier with a more robust safety net since single women my age are largely left to fend for ourselves in a world irksomely designed for nuclear families.

But we still paint this picture of parenthood, namely motherhood, as this set of sacrifices to be extolled. Newsflash: the ability to endure shit is not a personality trait. Nor is it an indicator of living in a healthy society. We have to change this from both the ground up, on a community level, and from top down with a massive public policy overhaul and yeeting the oligarchs.

I mean, I was still recovering from my second operation when we get smacked with a pandemic where the response was woefully inadequate from this crumbling trash heap empire. This is America, my expectations were in the gutter: both the Trump and Biden administrations had tectonic plates soaring over them. Now we’re heading into 2 years of our lives and millions of loved ones lost to something we did not ask for, and where the response has been disastrous from day one.

Yet there’s still handwringing about Millennials not having kids? Oh no. Shut your traps.

All your life you’re told too young and inexperienced to pursue the things you want to take up, until one arbitrary day when you’re supposedly too old and missed your chances.

Fuck that shit, I’m DONE.

What did I have to show for all that sacrifice I was forced into, then ones I made under duress? Just like with my old tax clients, it was largely POINTLESS. Who benefited from that sacrifice? I sure as hell didn’t yet we still just expect it of people, especially of women.

So screw all that. My thirties and beyond are for ME, my loved ones, my fans, everything I built and love. I made it to 36 with tons of incredibly stupid things and people trying to kill me, and I’m going to spite all you fuckers well past the time my ashes salt the world’s amphibian marshes. NO MORE FUTILE SACRIFICES.

Having kids would not enrich my life in any fashion. I’m not saying it wouldn’t for everyone — just for me personally.

You don’t get human pets that never age past toddler years like you do in Stardew Valley. It’s a massive responsibility I don’t want. Having to raise kids would pull me away from all the things I finally get to participate in that give me joy, life, love, and meaning: making games, writing, shitposting, participating in subculture, and amphibian and reptile husbandry and biology.

Not to mention finally taking care of myself. And believe me, Froggy Sluts: taking care of severely traumatized body is like being your own baby. Especially after you spent most of your life being told to just toughen up, deal with it, you’re exaaagggerrrrating, and all the other utterly grating horseshit women are told.

But should having kids be a sacrifice to such a strong degree? I don’t think so.

Maybe I would’ve felt differently about bearing children if I wasn’t dealt decades of damage, and didn’t feel healed enough until I reached official “high risk pregnancy age”. Where it took 5 years in therapy and a few more talking about it on the Internet as I simultaneously built the life and career I always wanted.

Or perhaps if I had one of those happy normal families like a lot of my classmates did, where they also had lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived nearby and weren’t divorced from their cultures the way I ruthlessly was at a young age. Where I got to have the familial love and stability I longed for, but only felt when I visited my grandparents who are no longer here.

Perhaps if I had all that and lived in a country where I could focus on healing if I got sick, instead of doing NASA-grade calculus equations every November when open enrollment comes.

And to be clear, all of that should change. I don’t want anyone to get saddled with a $40,000 bill for giving birth even though this is something I don’t plan on doing myself. (And no, I’m not adopting either. Unless it’s a toad, frog, lizard, or snake. Once again, saying “Just adopt!” is a deeply-ingrained expectation of women to make sacrifices caring for someone else.)

We also need to get rid of this completely ridiculous parenting culture that just places so much onus on mothers to burn themselves out trying to do literally everything, all while still earning an income. This is NOT sustainable.

But even if we fixed all that, I’m still not having kids. I made more than enough sacrifices I did not ask for on individual and societal levels, and I’m done with the fetishization of constantly making pointless sacrifices when we have no guarantee they’ll pay off.

I’m done with making sacrifices I didn’t consent to. This is one where I finally have some agency, and I say NO.

…unless it’s a toad.